The forgotten band Tom Morello said “kicked my ass”
Tom Morello is a serious man.
In fact, calling the Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitar legend “a serious man” might be like calling Robert Smith “a little forlorn” or John Lydon “a tad disagreeable”. The man made his name in one of the most righteous and intense bands of the 1990s. That’s a decade that also gave the world Bikini Kill and Nine Inch Nails, and yet, Rage and their fire-spitting rap-metal polemics take the crown as some of the most legit rockers of the entire decade.
However, that’s not to say that there was never a sense of fun in the band. I mean, as anyone who’s started a pit at the rock night the moment ‘Killing in the Name’ drops will tell you, the appeal of Rage isn’t just the politics. Like Dead Kennedys before them, Manic Street Preachers alongside them, and Kneecap after them, the band knows that very few people will just want to focus on the politics. The best way those radical ideas can be delivered is via the medium of kick-ass riffs.
That’s not to say that the political aspects of Rage are the greens you have to eat to get to dessert. Or even that the riffs and hooks are a craven concession to get the things that really matter into people’s ears. The two of them go hand in hand and become a truly transgressive piece of art together, such that they never could be apart. Tom Morello himself may be the best example of this compared to all his Rage Against the Machine bandmates as well.
Zach De La Rocha may be the long-lost member of Public Enemy up front. Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk bring the (renegades of) funk. Yet Tom Morello on guitar brings the sheer metal fun. Those riffs that can bring stadiums to their knees were more often than not written by him. Every time he talks about the music that truly shaped him, he’s as likely to talk about Judas Priest and Iron Maiden as he is KRS-One.
Which was the first band to really speak to Tom Morello?
In fact, the very first band to truly be Morello’s own couldn’t have been further from the furrowed-brow, sociopolitical beatdowns that he’d create with Rage. In fairness to the lad, this was a band he got into when he was ten. Anyone who says they got into a band like The Clash or System of a Down at ten and actually understood the ins and outs of their politics is lying through their teeth. In Morello’s case, the band weren’t exactly political firebrands, but they were boundary pushing in their own way.
In a profile written for Pitchfork on the music of his life, Morello talked about how English glam rock band Sweet’s third studio album, Desolation Boulevard, completely rewired the way he thought about music. Off the back of ‘The Ballroom Blitz‘ becoming a global hit bigger than anyone in the band thought it could be, the American release of their third album was fitted with their early singles, too, and a young Tom Morello was hooked.
“I liked the picture on the cover, and a lot of songs intimated a world that was much different and more exciting than the staid, conservative suburb in which I lived,” he admitted, adding, “Sweet kicked my ass with their glam hard rock with a pinch of prog in it.” Which, in a way, is exactly what Morello would be trying to do with Rage Against the Machine. Rage’s way would involve fewer catsuits and platform boots, but both bands act as a gateway drug for suburban teenagers trapped in a world that seems too restricting for them.
It might have been achieved in very different ways, but Morello ended up being to a generation of listeners what Sweet was to him, and that’s something very special indeed.
